WASHINGTON (AP) _ Roger Durbin thought something was missing when he visited the capital in 1960: Why was there no memorial commemorating World War II? After brewing over the idea for years and talking to other veterans, Durbin was at a fish fry in northwest Ohio in 1986 when he shouted his question to U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur.
''His feet were firmly planted, his jaw squared,'' Kaptur recalls. ''He was trying to make a spectacle and put me on the spot, and he was having a royal time doing it.''
Kaptur responded, ''What about Iwo Jima?'' Durbin said the memorial of soldiers raising a U.S. flag commemorates Marines who served in one battle. Kaptur pulled up a chair and said, ''Let's talk.'' Although Durbin didn't live to see it, a memorial to the war of his generation is expected to be opened by the end of April, nearly 18 years after he posed the question. Kaptur, a Democrat from Toledo, introduced a bill authorizing a memorial four times before it became law in 1993. Eventually, $174 million was raised for its construction.
''It's almost unbelievable,'' said Durbin's son Peter, a retired high school English teacher. ''We didn't have a clue that it would go this far or that he would be in the center of this. He was so persistent.''
Born in Sylvania, Ohio, Durbin enlisted in the Army after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. He was a tank mechanic for the 10th Armored Division and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
''The way the news broadcasts sound now, we are doing alright over there so maybe war won't last too much longer. I also pray that this will be our last war,'' Durbin wrote to his son in 1944.
After the war, Durbin and his wife, Marian, settled into their working-class, Midwestern lifestyle. He worked as a letter carrier and, after retiring, served as a Richfield Township trustee. That's what put him in Kaptur's path as he was frying fish at a gathering of Lucas County officials in Curtice.
''I could not believe there had been an omission of this magnitude,'' said Kaptur, a history major. She wrote to the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution to make sure. Mike Conley, WWII Memorial associate executive director, said that after the war, people were more focused on returning to their lives.
Kaptur thought at the time that no one would oppose a war memorial. However, there were disagreements over how the money for the memorial should be raised, who should manage it and where it should be built. The idea gained momentum in the mid-1990s with the sale of gold World War II commemorative coins. Former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, also a World War II veteran, and Federal Express CEO Fred Smith signed on to lead the fund raising. Steven Spielberg, who directed ``Saving Private Ryan,'' and the movie's star Tom Hanks also backed the project.
But the memorial ran into other roadblocks, when opponents argued that it shouldn't be located in the middle of the National Mall, and sued to delay construction. Others claimed the design was gaudy or authoritarian. The monument is in the mall, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Two 43-foot granite arches adorned with bronze eagles and symbolizing the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of the war stand at each end of an oval pool of water filled with fountains and waterfalls. A wall of 4,000 gold stars commemorates the more than 400,000 Americans killed. Fifty-six smaller granite pillars decorated with bronze wreaths surround the pool, representing a state or territory from that period and the District of Columbia. The Ohio pillar is in the southwestern part of the ring, between Kentucky and Indiana.
Durbin, who had testified before Congress and helped President Clinton dedicate the site in 1995, kept pushing the issue by working the phones from his home in Berkey, Ohio, a town of 265 people near Toledo, on the Ohio-Michigan state line. In 1999, Ohio lawmakers approved $500,000 in public funds for the memorial. Forty-seven other state legislatures also have contributed.
''He was constantly calling us for updates,'' Conley said. ``I'd answer the phone: 'Mike, it's Roger. What's going on? How much money have you raised? Are we making progress? When is this going to get done? I'm not going to be here forever.''' Durbin, 79, died four months before ground was broken in 2000. Family members and friends will attend the memorial's dedication May 29.
''In a sense, when we lost him, it kind of encapsulated what we had been saying for so long about the urgency of completing this tribute, of how rapidly we were losing that special generation,'' Conley said. The Veterans Affairs Department estimates the 16 million World War II vets are dying at a rate of 1,056 a day _ more than 385,000 a year. Fewer than 4 million will be alive when the memorial is dedicated.
''I grew up hearing my grandfather say, 'I hope you never have to face what my generation had to in the way of Depression and war,''' said Melissa Growden, one of Durbin's two grandchildren and a member of the Memorial Advisory Board. ''He simply wanted our nation to thank that generation.''
